A Life of Equations Shifting to a Life of Words

As my technical life diminishes, my writing life increases. Since 2017 I have been writing, first a memoir of my time in the Intelligence Community, then poetry and flash fiction. One of the missions I have assigned to my poetry is to expose to `regular\u27 people the inner life of the mathematical person. The poems in this poetry folder develop three themes. Formulations\u27\u27 pokes a bit of fun at the bloated (and in this case almost musical) titles that can grow from our research; more seriously, it documents the change in self-definition that flows from recognizing the inevitable drift away from high-intensity math as we age. Least Lower Bound\u27\u27 is a bit of an exaggeration of the way we can develop the habit of translating important life events into the sometimes stilted and overelaborate language we use in our technical work. It also illustrates how deeply we can come to use that language to translate the world to ourselves. Academic Inquiry\u27\u27 is the first of several poems I have written about the massive role that teaching has played in my life. If this poem were a wine, a reviewer might say it combines notes of yearning, pride, and challenge with a finish of wry resignation\u27\u27

Extending the solid step fixed-charge transportation problem to consider two-stage networks and multi-item shipments

This paper develops a new mathematical model for a capacitated solid step fixed-charge transportation problem. The problem is formulated as a two-stage transportation network and considers the option of shipping multiple items from the plants to the distribution centers (DC) and afterwards from DCs to customers. In order to tackle such an NP-hard problem, we propose two meta-heuristic algorithms; namely, Simulated Annealing (SA) and Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA). Contrary to the previous studies, new neighborhood strategies maintaining the feasibility of the problem are developed. Additionally, the Taguchi method is used to tune the parameters of the algorithms. In order to validate and evaluate the performances of the model and algorithms, the results of the proposed SA and ICA are compared. The computational results show that the proposed algorithms provide relatively good solutions in a reasonable amount of time. Furthermore, the related comparison reveals that the ICA generates superior solutions compared to the ones obtained by the SA algorithm

Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2006, nr 4

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